Category: Technology

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Entertainment Movies News Technology

iPhone… very nice!

Ok, I'm not going to go on about this, but I will say that I saw the Apple page for the iPhone today and it is, as Borat would say… "Very nice". It's a slick device (as you would come to expect from Apple), phone, mp3 player, and wifi-enabled web device. I'm not decided if I really want one, but it is pretty sexy. There are some user interface designs that I find interesting, such as "pinching" a photo to shink it's view and "stretching" to enlarge, and it's cover art 'flip' view of your music collection. I also appreciate the built-in Wi-Fi, web browser, and the simple integration with Google maps. Overall it's a very neat device. I'll be curious to see how real-world use shapes up once it's available.

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News Politics Technology

Lunchtime links

During lunch, while eating a delicious chicken sandwich and scanning my usual lunchtime news sites (Digg and Slashdot) I found the following tidbits that I thought I'd share.

Web developers, just say no to Internet Explorer
An interesting little read from a frustrated developer (presumably, doesn't say what he does for a living, just what kind of company he works for), a site dedicated to trying to make 2007 and 'IE-free year', given it's poor standards-compliance. I know first-hand the pain that IE causes. Anyway, Read it! (www.nomoreiehacks.org)

Pentagon: War on terror in Iraq, caused more harm than good
From an article of the Sunday Herald on December 26th, 2006, the Pentagon has been attributed as admitting that the war on terror in Iraq has done more harm than good in terms of the objective, to win the hearts and minds of the people, removing the power from terror goups. Read It! (findarticles.com)

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General Technology

New circusgeek.com

Today I decided to retire the old (and stinky) circusgeek.com site, which hadn't been touched in over 3 years (and you thought a month between blog posts is bad, heh)… and launched a new one that serves as an index of the three more interesting (and more active) sites that I have on the server. I thought about just dumping people directly to this blog, and perhaps one day I'll get around to merging everything into one site (at least my blog and photo sites)… but for now I think this is a bit better, and doesn't have content that I need to keep 'fresh'. Whew. 🙂

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Technology

A great Firefox extension for bloggers

Today while going to the Mozilla addons site to find a particular Firefox extension I discovered something called Performancing. This, for you bloggers out there, is a really great browser extension that makes for ‘one-click’ blogging to your blog of choice. After the extension has been installed all you have to do is click the icon (a little pencil and pad of paper) on the bottom-right of the browser to pop up a small WYSIWYG editor. Once you’ve set up your blog account (or accounts, you can set up multiple profiles) with an easy and intuitive wizard and you’re ready to go. I’m writing this post via the extension now. One extra-spiffy feature is that you can start a post by right-clicking on a page, so if you wanted to post about a page your’re currently browsing you can do so pretty quick and easy. Neat!

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News Technology

Movies for Sony PSP endangered?

According to this article on Reuters, movies for the PSP (on their proprietary UMD, or Universal Media Disc)  may be going away. Apparently two major studio’s (Universal Studios and Paramount Pictures) have dropped the format already, and others may follow suit, due to lackluster sales of films on the format. The article mentions that Retailers are also considering dropping UMD from their shelves entirely. Bad news for PSP owners who like to relax on the train and watch movies. Fortunately there are a lot of titles out there now, and it will likely take a LOT for Sony Pictures to dump the format, so there may still be some hope, for a while anyway.

The article cites a few possible reasons for the drop-off in sales, two of which I myself found likely. One is the release of the fifth generation iPod (with video support), because between the device itself and the ability to buy television shows with iTunes it’s made a very easy (and relatively cheap) process for customers. Two is that there’s no way to hook your PSP up to a TV, so you can’t watch the movies you purchase on anything BUT your PSP (much less being able to play games on a TV). This was something that always left me scratching my head, make a slick device with good graphics, good game performance, add movie playback with a brand new format (UMD), and then don’t add any kind of TV-out on the thing. Huh? *scratches head* emoticon